*Fun In The Ghost Town* is six tracks long and wastes precisely none of them. It announces itself not with the nervous overreach common to debut records \u2014 the sprawling runtime, the tonal inconsistency \u2014 but with the focused ferocity of a band who rehearsed these songs for years before anyone outside their postcode got to hear them. Caitlin Malcuit and drummer Steve Herdegen began writing together in 2019, got exactly one pre-pandemic jam in before the world shut itself inside, and spent the lockdown bashing demos into GarageBand through a MIDI keyboard and a podcast microphone. That particular origin story matters. You can hear it. The songs have the tightness of material that has been lived with, argued over, and stripped back to its load-bearing bones.<\/p>
The record opens with **Spiders** \u2014 a title that tells you immediately where you are: slightly unsettling, slightly funny, absolutely not safe for anyone who prefers their music to leave them alone. It establishes the band’s sound at its most atmospheric before **Girl** arrives to demonstrate that Cat TV can do directness just as well as texture. These two tracks function as a kind of dual manifesto: here is our mood, here is our punch. The rest of the record makes good on both promises.<\/p>
**Baby I’m Down** follows as a straightforward punk anthem about jettisoning responsibility, driven by drumming that suggests Herdegen was raised on a diet of pure adrenaline. It is the EP’s most immediate moment, the one you will find yourself humming on the bus while looking somewhat more threatening than you intended. **Impostor!** \u2014 that exclamation mark doing considerable work \u2014 arrives mid-record with a nervous energy entirely suited to its subject, a song that understands imposter syndrome not as a concept to be examined but as a feeling to be shouted at full volume until it briefly retreats.<\/p>
**JAG U R** is the record’s centrepiece and its best argument for Cat TV’s particular genius. It begins as a simple, relatable grievance \u2014 Herdegen caught behind a luxury vehicle doing criminally low speeds \u2014 and becomes something genuinely cathartic, the kind of song that gets funnier the louder you play it. That is harder to pull off than it sounds. The lyrical premise should collapse under the weight of its own banality, and instead it soars. Malcuit’s vocal performance is the key: delivered with absolute conviction, as though highway impotence were the most cosmically serious injustice of our time, which on some days, frankly, it is.<\/p> The EP closes with **Drugz N Alcohol**, which earns its deliberately artless title by being neither a cautionary tale nor a glorification, but something more interestingly ambiguous \u2014 the sound of a band that has thought carefully about what the last track on a debut record should feel like, and decided it should feel like this. It lands with the weight of a proper ending.<\/span><\/p> The band’s sound sits at a peculiarly appealing crossroads: the melodic intelligence of early 90s American alternative, the blunt-force physical pleasure of garage punk, and the dry, knowing wit of a band that writes songs about Satanic Panic and jaguars without ever feeling like they’re doing a bit. The lineup \u2014 Malcuit and Herdegen joined by Quinn Lawrence on bass and lap steel, Jesse Buday across bass, guitar, and keyboards, and Dino on bass and guitar \u2014 has the kind of collective density that makes live performances genuinely unpredictable. Nearly everyone plays bass, which is either a logistical headache or the secret to the record’s low-end wallop, possibly both.<\/span><\/p> The whole thing was recorded at Blue Banshee Recording Studio in Brewster, MA, owned by Chris Duggan of Ruin the Nite. The production has air in it. The guitars bite but breathe. One should add, for the historical record, that Malcuit tracked her lead vocals in the studio’s shower. The water was not running. This piece of information is delivered in the press release without elaboration, which is exactly right, and suggests a band with a fundamentally sound instinct for narrative economy.<\/span><\/p> The Lowell scene has been quietly incubating something interesting. *Fun In The Ghost Town* is the sound of it finally reaching the surface. Catch them August 1st at The Worthen Attic \u2014 the bill includes The Ghouls, champions of the 2024 Rock & Roll Rumble \u2014 where one strongly suspects Cat TV will steal the evening out from under everyone.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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